


Greater Love

by reinetta



Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: (sort of), Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, gratuitous use of wwi poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-22
Updated: 2018-03-22
Packaged: 2019-04-06 16:26:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14060850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reinetta/pseuds/reinetta
Summary: A heatwave in Oxford brings up old memories and repressed feelings.





	Greater Love

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place during Series 2, shortly after Nocturne. I know nothing about Oxford geography, next to nothing about the North African Campaign, and only a bit about canals. Also this is literally my first fic ever so there's that.
> 
> With love and thanks to K.

It was all very well, Fred Thursday thought, falling for beautiful young men when he’d been -- if not beautiful -- at least young himself.

 

And it had been wartime. There were only so many friends you could see blown to bits before your wires got crossed, and any scrap of beauty took on a sacred aspect: something to be treasured, held as a talisman against the hot, endless roar of the desert. He’d learned then what Wilfred Owen, a short generation before, had meant about _limbs knife-skewed_ and _hearts made great with shot_ . He rewrote the opening lines for himself -- _Red lips are not so red / As the stained sand kissed by the English dead_ \-- and thought confusedly of Win’s rationed lipstick, and Hopkins, and Allerton, and the men he’d seen dying and dead.

 

He saw their faces sometimes, when he looked at Morse. Not in winter so much, when the lad turned almost translucently pale, but in summertime, with his skin tanned honey-gold and freckles blossoming across his nose and cheekbones, he could have been any one of Thursday’s erstwhile comrades. He remembered how they’d all scorched slowly to autumn colours in the North African sun, and tried not to think how his bagman would look with his expressive face slack, blood in his hair, and dust in his open eyes.

 

He’d never been ashamed of this tendency in himself. He’d loved men and women, loved Win most of all, and chosen to make a home with her, because what was the alternative? Dangerous, surreptitious pleasure in back alleys and public conveniences or else a long and lonely bachelorhood. Besides, it was illegal, and doubly unforgivable given his position. Though there were whisperings lately about a repeal, of a bill working its way through the parliamentary system.

 

Despite the law, despite his lingering horror, despite his resistance -- it was the odd, new-old familiarity of Morse under a bright sun that started everything.

 

Oxford sweltered in its third day of a record-breaking heatwave. July, in its death throes, had decided to take everyone else with it. The air was thick and heavy, the stones of the city throbbing with soaked-up sunlight. In the furnace currently masquerading as a police station, WPCs were dropping like flies and being carried downstairs one by one to recuperate in the tiled coolness of the cells. It took Strange, toppling like a felled tree and nearly taking Jakes down on the way, for Bright to reluctantly grant a jackets-off reprieve from his exacting standards of attire. But ties had to stay, and Thursday could feel his turning slowly to a damp rag around his neck.

 

So it came as a relief when Davison, a person of interest in their latest case, was sighted in Jericho, and he and Morse could exchange the crushing heat of the office for the merely stagnant heat of the great outdoors. The car, mercifully, had been parked in the shade and a warm but very welcome breeze wove lazily through the open windows as they drove. Morse, his sleeves already rolled to the elbow, had removed his tie and undone his top buttons as they crossed the car park. Thursday watched a drop of sweat run from his temple, over the line of his jaw, and disappear into the darkness beneath his wilted collar.

 

Morse had caught the sun during their hours of door-to-door the day before, his bare forearms, the ridge of his nose, and the tips of his ears burned to a shade like coral, but even beneath that lobster-redness he looked flushed. Thursday made a mental note to stick him under a tree in the pub garden and get a pint of weak ale down him as soon as their shift was done.

 

He never knew when to stop, this one. Not just with the drink, though that was becoming a problem lately too. Thursday was all for working a case to its conclusion, putting the hours in best he could without neglecting Win and the kids, but Morse was something else. He couldn’t seem to stop, couldn’t quiet his whirring brain, had to keep worrying at things like a dog with a rabbit in its teeth. And yet all this with such an air of melancholy that Fred wondered sometimes if he even cared, or just felt compelled. Thursday remembered too well where that outlook led -- could still see Morse, grey and curled up in the passenger seat during that desperate drive north. And later, the bleak hollowed-out look on his face as he stood in the snow covered garden, looking small as a child and just as scared. Not just grief, not just the bullet in his thigh, but the exhaustion of a man who’d worked too hard, and given too much for too long.

 

He had plenty _to_ give, of course -- huge reserves of determination, ambition, intelligence, even compassion. He glowed, was incandescent with feeling in one direction or another, vibrating at a tense, anxious frequency. Under his (mostly) stoic face, Thursday could almost hear the oceanic crash of it. But it wasn’t a bottomless well, and he never wanted to see it run dry.

 

Cursing the syrupy air and his burgeoning headache for this jumbled metaphor, Thursday thought instead of that deep freezing snow -- of sinking his hands into it and touching an icy palm to Morse’s feverish head.

 

This last thought came unbidden, and Thursday shook it away like a cloud of midges. A bit of looking after was one thing -- no different than with Sam or Joan -- especially given the lad’s upbringing, and not having a nice reliable girl around to keep an eye. But the electric thrill at the thought of his hands on Morse’s heated skin, the stirring in a place he was trying now sincerely not to think about, was quite another. It was the heat, giving him a funny turn, that was all. Best to let the breeze, such as it was, wash the thought away. He refocused his eyes on the road.

 

But then Davison had bolted like a spooked horse, and taken off down an alleyway between terraced houses, Morse in begrudging but energetic pursuit. Thursday, radioing control with one hand and steering with the other, hurled the car around three sharp corners in the wrong gear, meaning to head Davison off. The road ended at the canal, a flat, black snake of a thing shining sullenly in the brightness. Their panicked quarry appeared from a gap in the buildings to find himself caught between Morse at his heels and the Jag blocking his escape route. Without pausing, he took a running jump, leaped, and crashed feet first into the murky water.

 

Morse skidded to a halt, swaying in the kicked up cloud of dust, then lightly, almost with a shrug, he dived. To Thursday, standing behind the open car door, he seemed frozen in that attitude, his lean body bent in a graceful arc. _Like swimmers into cleanness leaping,_ he thought stupidly, irrelevantly.

 

The spell broke when Morse’s clasped hands broke the skin of the water. Thursday rushed to the bank, suddenly breathless, hands landing heavy on his knees. Bloody fools, the pair of them! Who knew what was beneath the surface of that water? Visions of abandoned bicycles, hidden concrete sills, and all manner of brutal industrial machinery heat-hazed before his eyes. He expected any moment to see blood bloom across the face of the water, to watch a pale, mangled body rise like flotsam from the depths.

 

Instead, finally, blessedly, two heads crowned into the air. Thursday sagged, almost sinking to his knees in relief. Davison, an enthusiastic but apparently inexpert swimmer, thrashed his arms like a windmill. Morse dragged him with some effort towards the further bank, where a squad car was thundering into view across the water meadow beyond. Morse’s face was set but triumphant, shining with the reflected light of the water. His hair hung in wet curls over his forehead and something that wasn’t relief churned in Thursday’s stomach.

 

Two uniformed constables seized Davison under the arms and hauled him over the sharp edge of the canal before taking him, spluttering, away. Morse hoisted himself out of the water and lay like a netted fish on the towpath, flat on his back, gasping up at the brilliant sky.

 

“Morse!” Thursday shouted hoarsely, finding his breath and his voice all at once. “You all right?”

 

A hand raised, waved almost dismissively, and dropped. Thursday mopped his face gratefully with a handkerchief. A frothing combination of concern and rage boiled in his chest, hot as the air around him. He spotted the black and white gates of lock a little way upstream and ran towards it.

 

Morse, when Thursday reached him, was rolling exhaustedly onto his side preparatory to standing up. His shirt, a little too big as always, now clung to his narrow back. Thursday could see bony shoulder blades and the bumps of his spine through its wet, onion-skin translucence. He put a hand under Morse’s forearm and helped him to his feet. Up close the man was now pale under his sunburn rather than flushed, and had a bruise-like pallor around his eyes.

 

“Fancied a dip, did you?” said Thursday grimly. “I’ll deal with you in a minute.” He could feel Morse’s wounded gaze on the back of his neck as he walked away to talk to the waiting constables.

 

“Take him to the nick and let him stew for the night,” he told MacPherson. “Serve him right for making us play silly buggers in this damn weather. You’ll have to kick Strange out of cell four.”

 

Thursday watched the squad car until it was out of sight, delaying the moment when he would have to turn and look at Morse.

 

Stupid boy could’ve got himself killed. He’d no right to that young, agile body if he wasn't going to take proper care of it. Knifed in the Bodleian as well as shot, that too because his brain rushed ahead and took the rest of him with it -- forgetting how fragile, how vulnerable, flesh can be. Thursday patted his pockets for his pipe, realising with disappointment that it was in his jacket, which was on the back seat of the car. Nothing for it, then. He turned back to the canal.

 

And suddenly he was in the desert again. He could almost taste it. No longer the tang of standing water, the sweetness of long grass, instead -- dust, salt, and petrol. The sun beating down on his head was older, fiercer.

 

The cause was Morse. He’d stripped to the waist, his sodden shirt spread on the grass to dry. A farmer’s tan, they called it, though soldier’s tan was just as appropriate to Fred’s mind. They’d all looked like that after a few weeks, laughed about it, compared the sharpness of the lines at their elbows and collarbones, thighs and shins.

 

The untouched (by the sun, but now Thursday was thinking of his own hands again, felt them move at his sides as though reaching, yearning) parts of Morse’s torso were pale as milk, dotted with freckles and flushed pink from his exertion. Thursday saw again the men he’d loved in Africa, blinked as their faces bled into view, Morse shimmering like a mirage under the weight of memory, remembered how later -- the last of the regiment and the end of summer -- they’d jumped naked into cold mountain lakes, that same pattern of brown limbs and white bodies spread wide in joy, for a blissful moment free of war, washed clean of blood and dirt.

 

But this was Morse he was looking at. Sparse muscle and jutting bone stood out even from a distance, sharply angled shoulders sweeping to strong but slender arms, a too-narrow waist, scattered with golden hair lighter than any on his head. The scar of that knife wound, DeBryn’s best stitches notwithstanding, was a dark line in the shadow of his ribcage. Needed feeding up, as always, Thursday noted in a distant part of his mind. Further down, past the waistband of his trousers -- also wet, also clinging -- he knew there would be a second scar, but his brain seemed to short-circuit before he could imagine anything further.

 

This old feeling -- attraction, _desire_ , for another man -- so familiar, yet so deeply unwelcome here, for this man, his bagman. Thursday, already half-mad with anger, worry, and the damned heat, felt claustrophobic from the inside out, weighed down with more feeling that he knew what to do with.

 

Morse, meanwhile, was tapping mournfully at his watch before bending to unlace his shoes. He swayed visibly and then sat down in a sudden heap. Like a sleeper waking, Thursday walked briskly over. Morse was a tangle of long limbs, one hand over his eyes to shade them from the sun, looking paler than ever. Thursday knelt stiffly before him and, at a loss for anything else to do, finished unlacing Morse’s shoes. He eased them off and poured a stream of muddy water from each one. Then he rolled down his wet socks -- faded navy blue and rather holey -- exposing the narrow, bird-thin bones of Morse’s ankles and feet.

 

“That better?” To his own ears the words were taut with unvoiced emotion, but Morse seemed too far gone to notice. He nodded and then groaned at the movement, going a little green around the gills.

 

“Think you can manage to the car?”

 

Instead of nodding, this time Morse made one of the noncommittal noises that, even in peak health, comprised much of his conversation.

 

Thursday tucked the discarded clothes under one arm and helped Morse upright with the other. He stumbled, and fell lightly against him, bare flesh against clothed. Even through his shirt, Thursday could feel the clammy yet over-heated dampness of Morse’s skin.

 

“Alright lad, I’ve got you.”

 

He guided Morse along the towpath, wincing at the sight of gravel under his naked feet (Morse seemed barely to notice) back towards the lock. There was a narrow duckboard by way of a bridge, following the angled chevron made by the top of the closed gates. It had an iron handrail on one side and a long drop into the dark water on the other. Thursday didn’t remember it looking so perilous on his first trip across.

 

“Up you go,” he said to Morse. “And mind you hold on, I’m not fishing you out if you go in the drink again.”

 

Even with Morse’s left hand on the railing in a bone-white grip, Thursday felt the need of steadying him. He laid a large hand, almost shyly, on Morse’s waist until they were safely over. It sent prickles of electricity through his fingers to do so. When they reached solid ground Morse turned and looked curiously at the hand on him, so brown on his pale skin, then up at Thursday from under heavy eyelids. The blue fire of his eyes, even befuddled with heat stroke, caught Thursday like a blow to the abdomen. He knew not to trust the blithe, innocuous look he saw there. Morse was always thinking something _,_ normally far too much of something, for anyone -- suspect or otherwise -- to safely let their guard down.

 

“Get this back on,” he said gruffly, to cover his awkwardness, helping Morse into his nearly-dry shirt. “Else you’ll stick to the seat.” The Jaguar, driver door still flung wide, awaited them.

 

“I’m taking you to see DeBryn.” Thursday deposited a compliant Morse in the passenger seat and got in on the other side. “Heat stroke by the look of you. It took our Sam the same way once, too much running about on the beach at Bognor. But I’m worried about that canal water -- you must have swallowed about a glassful.”

 

Morse had his eyes closed, looking greener than ever, but said firmly, “not the mortuary. M’fine.”

 

“You’re bloody not!” said Thursday, starting the engine. But as they approached Walton Street he remembered their first visit to DeBryn, Morse passing clean out and landing with surprising weight in his arms, so at the junction turned left instead of right. Morse squinted at the passing scenery with one bleary eye.

 

“Home?”

 

Thursday considered Morse’s pokey bedsit, crammed into the attic of a tall, narrow Victorian house. There was that smart young nurse, but three flights of stairs, and hot air rising every minute. Then he thought of his own home: Win making a cooling meal of boiled fish and potato salad for the balmy evening, Sam and Joan laying the small patio table out back and fighting over who had to fetch ices from the corner shop. A curling wisp of guilt rose in him at the image. Besides, Morse needed peace and quiet. Back to Plan A, he thought.

 

“Pub.”

 

The riverside garden of The Trout was overflowing with office clerks and shop girls soaking up the afternoon sunlight, looking peaky and freshly peeled, with open collars and rolled up skirts. Leaving Morse at a shady table beneath a willow tree, just as he’d envisioned hours earlier, Thursday went inside to the bar. When he returned with a pint of best and a glass of water, Morse scowled. At least he’d lost his greenish tinge along with regaining his recalcitrance.

 

“No arguments. Get it down you. But slowly, else you’ll be sick.”

 

Between sullen but grateful sips, Morse turned out his trouser pockets. There were no notes in his wallet, so all was well there, a few coins missing perhaps. His keys were safe and sound, but his warrant card had to be laid in the sun that brushed the end of their table to dry out properly. The inked _E. Morse_ was all but washed away, just a few traces of blue remaining. Thursday wondered if he’d asked for the abbreviation, to save his blushes and the inevitable questions every time he made himself known to a member of the public. He remembered the first time he’d said the preposterous, beautiful name aloud -- trying to shake Morse out of a reverie -- and the ornate weight of it on his tongue. Obviously the lad was embarrassed by it (what a thing to be saddled with) but Thursday thought it suited him. Awkward and unusual; yearning and noble all at once.

 

They sat in silence until Morse’s glass was empty. Then Thursday spoke, his tongue loosened by half of his own pint.

 

“You took a bloody stupid risk, Morse. He would’ve come out of his own accord, no need to go playing the hero.”

 

Morse shrugged. “There was no way of knowing that, sir.”

 

“And there was no way of knowing that damned canal was safe!” A few heads turned in their direction.

 

Morse gave a shifty, sideways look from under his eyebrows and rubbed the side of his neck. Thursday recognised the sheepish gesture and felt glad that he was getting through Morse’s defences, trying the while not to think about the heat of blood under the skin and the velvet shiver of short-cropped hair where head met shoulder. It was almost dry now, springing back into soft unruly waves.

 

“That’s your problem, Morse, you never bloody think.”

 

This time an eyebrow lifted, and Morse’s lips twitched.

 

Thursday huffed a mixture of irritation and amusement. “Alright, you never think before doing something foolhardy. You’ll be the death of me one of these days,” he added fervently.

 

Morse frowned again, more gently than before, and looked at Thursday’s face in a considering manner. Thursday coughed and hid his face in a deep draught from his tankard, feeling naked under Morse’s stare. Those eyes, again. That combination of worldly knowing and childlike innocence.

 

Morse dropped his gaze and knotted his hands in his lap. They were alone under the tree, the cheerful voices of the other patrons coming only distantly through the sluggish air. The low river rippled softly against the bank and through the fronds of willow that disturbed its passage.

 

“Sir.” Morse’s brow was creased and he spoke to the table. “Stop me -- if it’s the heat talking, or if…” -- he took a resolute but shallow breath. “Is it just today?” His eyes flicked up suddenly and locked onto Thursday’s. “I notice things, sir. And if it’s just today -- just the weather, tell me to forget it. But --”

 

Thursday felt as though his heart might have stopped. He’d be minded, had he been able to move, to check his pulse. He tightened his fingers on the handle of his glass.

 

“-- if it’s not. Just today, I mean.” Morse’s voice was clipped as ever, though ragged. He exhaled sharply, somewhere between irritation and embarrassment. “I was never any good at this sort of thing.”

 

“Morse,” Thursday said in a low rumble.

 

The lad was flushed right up to the ears, an anguished look on his face, like an animal searching for an escape route. “I’m -- I’m sorry, sir. I’ll get another round in, we can forget I said anything.” He began scooping coins back into his pocket with frantic hands. Fred stilled them both with one of his own.

 

“I’m old enough to be your father,” was all he could say.

 

Because Morse was right. It wasn’t just today, wasn't just the heat. It wasn’t just the terror for Morse’s life as he’d leaped into the unknown depths, or the ashen colour of his skin under the rose-petal sunburn, or the flooding, unbidden memories of dead men from long ago. That had been an easy lie to tell himself, until the weather had conspired to make unconscious thought unavoidable in an overheating brain.

 

Morse was watching him dazedly, his mouth a little open. Fred’s gut lurched at the sight, at the thought of Morse panting, breathless, desperate in quite a different way. Conscious of where they were, he drew his hand reluctantly away and drained his glass.

 

“I never liked my father much,” Morse said.

 

“Hmm. That’s more or less what I’m afraid of.”

 

Morse’s lips quirked. “I never took you for a Freudian, sir.”

 

“You can knock that off as well, while we’re at it,” said Thursday, ignoring the traitorous part of himself that thrilled at the epithet. “Feeling better, are you?”

 

“A little.” The colour -- a healthy one this time -- had come back into Morse’s cheeks. His back was straighter, his greyish eyes a little brighter. _Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes,_ thought Thursday. And something about candles. All so long ago now.

 

“Hop to it, then.” He jerked his head in the direction of the bar. “Get a proper drink in you and then we can...”

 

Morse tilted his head enigmatically. “Talk?”

 

“Yeah. Talk.”

 

 


End file.
